Zohran Mamdani is the latest sign establishment Democrats don’t know how to handle a populist challenge.
They haven’t learned anything from the defeats right-wing populism inflicted on them with Donald Trump. Now they’re knocked on their backsides by a new generation of left-wing populism in their own party.
Making Mamdani mayor of New York is like electing Bernie Sanders president — maybe even worse. But in an era when populism keeps gaining momentum, Democratic insiders habitually turn to political has-beens to rescue the party.
First it was Hillary Clinton, who staved off Sanders only to lose to Trump. Then it was Joe Biden, who got lucky in an election dominated by COVID lockdowns and George Floyd protests, even as Democrats knew he was far past his best-by date.
So the setback Trump’s right-of-center populism suffered in 2020 only set the stage for a comeback of historic proportions four years later. Democrats should have noticed their playbook wasn’t working even back in 2021, when Terry McAuliffe, the ex-governor and old Clinton crony they trotted out to run for Virginia’s top office, went crashing to defeat at the hands of Glenn Youngkin — a Republican who didn’t have a populist background but spoke to popular fury at lockdowns and rising crime.
Mamdani is the crudest kind of left-wing populist, offering outright socialism, including state-owned grocery stores, as his answer to New York’s problems. His medicine would in fact make things a lot worse, driving more high-earners out of the city, in a second exodus after the one COVID triggered.
A city already spending too much will have less revenue to pay for the even higher spending Mamdani wants, but that didn’t register with Democratic primary voters last week. What they saw and heard was a young, handsome Mamdani telling them more free stuff could be theirs — all they had to do was end Andrew Cuomo’s political career.
Cuomo didn’t take Mamdani’s challenge seriously enough, but then, top Democrats didn’t take voters seriously enough when they got behind Cuomo in the first place. He was damaged goods as well as yesterday’s news, a man who’d left the governor’s mansion in disgrace four years ago.
At a time when all the old idols are falling, did hauling this one out of the dumpster really seem like a bright idea? The party establishment might as well have run Anthony Weiner — and in fact, he was on the ballot last week, too, running for a City Council seat.
MAGA populism, unlike Mamdani’s, doesn’t spring from thinking there shouldn’t be billionaires. On the right, populism is about getting rid of barriers to middle- and working-class prosperity, by bringing jobs back to America and eliminating taxes on tips, for example.
And the right’s populism is cultural as well as economic, emphasizing common sense, the rejection of woke ideology, and patriotism. In a clash between rival populisms, the conservative kind prevails against what Mamdani and Sanders represent — in most places.
But New York is a blue city where Democratic loyalties run deep, and now that Mamdani is the party’s nominee, stopping him in the general election will take everything that non-socialist Democrats, independents and Republicans together can muster. The only way center-left Democrats will avoid this kind of debacle in the future is if they end their recycling program for Clintons, Bidens, Cuomos and Weiners and figure out what a mainstream Democratic populism in the 21st century might look like.
Democrats need a populism with less socialism and more patriotism, even if that looks a little more like the GOP’s formula — after all, it’s what works. The party of Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy used to know how to compete with Republicans for voters who were proud of being Americans, before identity politics and the Davos mindset took over the party’s elites.
But today the few Democrats who point their party back in the direction of Middle America are shunned for doing so: Sen. John Fetterman, for one. The party that made excuses for Biden up to the minute he was humiliated on national TV has been lately seeding the press with claims Fetterman isn’t mentally fit for office.
His fitness wasn’t an issue when he was elected in 2022 — Democrats stood by him despite the stroke he suffered that May. But that was before he started to buck party orthodoxy.
Late last month, Susquehanna polling found Fetterman doing better with Republicans than Democrats in his home state, with 45% approval from GOP voters versus just 40% from his own party. Democrats are shooting the messenger.
Without a populist message that isn’t as far left as Mamdani’s, they’re doomed to defeat in the country — and doomed to victories in blue cities that may hurt even more.
Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review. To read more by Daniel McCarthy, visit www.creators.com.
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